Anna Wetherell—The Sun/The Moon Timeline and Summary

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• She travels from Sydney to Dunedin, meeting Emery Staines on the boat. The two seem to feel an instant connection but don't exchange names.
• When she gets off the boat in Dunedin, she meets Lydia. Lydia sells Anna a line of bull to get her to come stay at her boarding house, where she does her darndest to get Anna financially indebted to her—and inclined toward less moral behavior.
• Anna forges a relationship with Crosbie Wells, Lydia's husband, before she realizes who he is. She gets pregnant.
• Crosbie mutilates Frank Carver while Anna watches. He tells Anna to take some of the laced alcohol Lydia planted in Anna's room to knock her out as her alibi for involvement in his attack on Carver and his escape.
• Anna gives Crosbie a gold nugget he had previously gifted to her to help him escape, which means she's more financially beholden to Lydia than ever.
• Eventually, Lydia kicks her out on the grounds that Anna is pregnant with her husband's child (although she had encouraged the affair). Anna sets sail for Hokitika, where she's to work for Dick Mannering, a "whoremonger," and work off her debt.
• Once she's in Hokitika, she buys some dresses salvaged from a wreck. Little does she know, they are filled with gold that Lydia Wells herself had sewn into the dresses as part of a scheme to make Lauderback (potentially) appear to be running gold offshore without paying duty.
• Long before she finds the gold in her dress, her friend Quee finds it and starts sneaking it out of her dress when she visits him stoned.
• She hears from Emery that he's in touch with Crosbie Wells. She asks him to relay the fact that she's pregnant.
• One day, when she's talking to Frank Carver in the street, a horse is startled by a nearby gunshot and kicks her, injuring her very badly. She loses the baby as a result. To protect Crosbie, she tells the men present that it's Frank Carver's baby.
• In the night Emery Staines disappears, she experiences a really bad blackout after taking her opium pipe—an unusually bad one. She can't explain what happened during that time, why she was in such bad shape, or how she got into the middle of the road and passed out before someone intercepted her.
• When she wakes up in jail, she finds the gold in her "whoring dress"—the one dress she never wore to Quee's.
• When she gets out of jail, she gives up the world's oldest profession and goes into formal mourning for her baby. Also, she and her friend Gascoigne get all the gold out of her orange whoring dress and stash it away under Gascoigne's bed.
• When Devlin comes to her with a half-burned deed that left half of Emery Staines's fortune to her (but was left unsigned), she signs it using a perfect imitation of Emery's signature. It's a mystery how she's able to do that, since she's never seen his signature before, and she doesn't even know how to read.
• She and Emery end up on trial for various crimes, once he's returned. She gets off on all charges.
• Emery is convicted, but he makes sure that Anna will have plenty of moolah while he's in prison. You see, they are lovers.